Pages

Monday, 31 July 2017

Hello
everyone! Newlife 0.4.10 has been released.
Early-access Patrons can find it in the creations section here. The changelog is below.The previous version is now public. You can download it using the links on the right-hand side of the blog. The public version's changelog is here.As usual, saved files & templates from older versions probably won't work with newer ones. For
new players - just use one of the links to the right to get a zipfile containing Newlife. Once unzipped, you'll see a folder containing .jar and .exe files. Either one of these will run the game.For
either version you'll need to have Java installed. A lot of programs
use Java so you might well already have it. If the jar shows up as an
unrecognised file type, then you probably don't. In that case you can
get it from http://www.java.com/. The
exe should tell you if you don't have the right version on your
computer, but you'll still need to install java to run the game.There's a guide for new players here which includes some troubleshooting tips for installation & downloading.

As mentioned in the last post, this version principally just adds support for user-submitted content.

Major
changes & additions:

Added support for user-submitted scenes along with a finger-cramping
amount of documentation...

Sunday, 30 July 2017

The next release will be out tomorrow. It focuses on adding support for written scene submissions.

In what should be an unsurprising turn of events to anyone who's followed my predictions in the past, it seems I've been massively over-optimistic about how quickly I could write the documentation for this. My plan was to put out a test version to a small group mid-month, rattle off the documentation in a few days and then get seriously stuck into improving infidelity mechanics.

Instead, I'm 83 pages into the two main reference documents with more to write for them and several further pieces of documentation still not started. As such, infidelity will have to wait and I might have to rush out a first draft of the overall writing and syntax guides.

From a developer POV this is a quite productive release: there's 2 scenes (the custom scene processing one and the test scene), the example mini-scene, the aforementioned mountain of documentation, and a few small bits and pieces.

From a player's POV though, there's very little to benefit them in 0.4.10 - there aren't any actual player-submitted scenes in the game yet and I don't anticipate getting serious submitted content in the first month while people are getting used to how it works and I'm still making improvements.

So, I guess what I'm getting at, is that if you've been considering making a pledge on Patreon then it might be better to hold fire until 0.4.11 comes out, at least unless you're extremely keen to start work on your own written content.

I'll make some blog posts soon with overviews of how key aspects of submission writing will work. This will mostly be drawn directly from drafts of the documentation so I'll be keen to see what people think - I'll want to look out for common questions and make sure the docs cover them.

In the meantime, I have one question for you to ponder: which free YML editor would you recommend? I've been using a plugin for my IDE that has nice syntax highlighting and that really makes it a lot easier to write. It isn't reasonable to expect writers to use a Java IDE when they aren't even coding in Java though, so it'd be handy if there was a good free editor I could link them to in the documentation.